Join us for a William English double bill: the premiere of Portraits & his acclaimed film Heated Gloves.
Doors: 7pm
Tickets: £7.50 via the link below
On the door: £10
Portraits dir.William English.
33’30” colour, sound by Dan Wilson. Edited by Patrycja Loranc.
Featuring: Jim Mellors/Victoria Ashley, Tony Gross, Vivienne Westwood, Stephane Raynor and John Nixon, Jack English and Jansje Schoen.
Footage dating from 1978 up to 2020. Originating on standard 8mm and 16mm and mini dv tape.
Heated Gloves: dir. William English
Modest living, the international mass media, the materiality of moving images and the residual noise of a life lived very differently. It centres on Captain Maurice Seddon, a man who came from money but very quickly had very little money indeed. In fact his anti-normative, unconventional lifestyle was extremely sparse and particular, as this film reveals. He developed and sold electrically heated clothing to people with health conditions and those of limited means. He was able to advertise his wares through numerous international TV appearances and many of these are gathered here, brilliantly sequenced to slowly reveal more about this eccentric, distinctly charismatic man who said “one does things which differ from the things done by others”.
William Fowler - BFI LFF 2015
One of the most extraordinary feature-length works here was William English’s Heated Gloves (all titles 2015), a portrait of Captain Maurice Seddon, a bachelor, heir to a lost fortune, aficionado of raw garlic and inventor of a range of electronically-heated clothing. Seddon was English’s close friend from the early 1980s until his death in 2014, and as a subject he is never shown merely as a kook or freak. The bulk of the film comprises TV footage of Seddon demonstrating his heated garments (low voltage electrified wires sewn into gloves, leggings, jogging tops) to reporters from Australia, Germany, Japan and Sweden, and from his appearances on the David Letterman and Johnny Carson shows. Bookending this is English’s own meditative 8mm, 16mm and video footage – recorded over a period of 20 years at the inventor’s ramshackle home – resulting in a work that reflects on time’s passing, technological redundancy and alternative ways of living.
Colin Perry, Frieze Magazine - December 2015